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agreesive all of a sudden

22 11:31:04

Question
Hi, I was housing my mini rex with my 3 new zealand white girls and my new zealand white X mini rex together... all are females, the 4 new zealand/new zeland cross girls are a little over seven weeks old now and the mini rex is about 4 1/2 months, anyways they all lived together happily for about six/seven days, cleaning each other, eating together, snuggling ect., but then all hell broke loose two nights ago my mini rex went nuts.... chasing the other rabbits around, biting them and banging into the cage... so I put the mini rex in a different cage, all bunnies ended up with a bite wound or two that has scabbed over.... why did she do this? they were all getting along so well..... what happened?

Answer
This can happen when one rabbit tries to pull a dominance act on another.  Without witnessing what happened (e.g., maybe one of the NZ girls tried to mount the Rex, and she didn't like that!), it's impossible to say what triggered the attack, but this is not at all unusual with unspayed females.

Please go to:

www.rabbit.org/

and use the search engine at the bottom of the page.  Input "bonding" as the key word, and a whole list of helpful articles will appear that will coach you on re-bonding them.  But it will be very difficult to do this until they're spayed.  In the meantime, it's smart to keep them physically separated, but not so far that they can't smell/see each other and interact a little bit.  Just don't confine them where they'll fight.  And never let a fight go once it starts.  Break it up immediately and let them have a "time out" until they calm down.

Hope that helps.

Dana